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I stopped at a shoe store first, and walked out twenty minutes later, with an enormous bag in hand. As soon as I climbed into my truck, tossed my purchase over into the passenger seat, and started the engine, I called my brother.
“Hey. You off work today?” I asked as soon as he answered.
“Yep.” JB sounded harassed and winded. “First full day off in two weeks, and I gotta deal with a fucking leak in my master bathroom. What’s up?”
“Just wondering if I could swing by for a while,” I said, already putting the truck into drive and turning that way. “Sponge some lunch off you, maybe. Shit like that.”
“Sure,” he said easily. “And you can help me rip out my bathtub and maybe a partition wall while you’re at it.”
So that’s what I found myself doing an hour later, crowbar in hand and fiberglass particles floating around my head. Pausing my task from ripping away a rotted two-by-four from the wall, I coughed into my armpit and blinked my vision clear.
JB glanced over fromhiscrowbar that he had wedged into the other end of the plank of wood. “Will you just put on a mask and safety glasses already? You have no idea what this shit could do to your lungs.”
“You sound like such an overbearing, big-brother doctor right now. You know that? It’s adorable. Really.”
And I lifted the crowbar again to help him remove the wood.
“Teagan!” my brother merely shouted through the house before we both worked together to pry the sucker loose.
“Luke!” his wife shouted back. “I don’t know what he told you to do this time. But just do it! Do you want my daughter to grow up without a damn uncle?”
The board popped loose. And both JB and I skipped a step back as it fell to the floor to avoid all the exposed nails.
As the dust settled, I looked up at him. “How the hell do you two do that?”
“What?” JB asked, holding out a mask and glasses. “The marriage mind-reading trick?”
I rolled my eyes and accepted the handful. “Yeah,” I said, only to grumble as soon as I fit the mask on. “Man, we have, like two boards left. Is this really necessary?”
“Yes. Stop whining.”
I rolled my eyes and followed the rules. Once I had the crowbar back in hand, I helped him start on the next board.
“So do you get any other nifty perks like that with marriage?”
“Oh, all kinds,” JB answered with a grin and a suggestive waggle of the brows.
I cringed and lifted a hand. “I didn’t mean sex, you perv. That’s my sister-in-law you’re talking about.”
With a chuckle, JB set his crowbar into place, and we grunted and worked together to free the second-to-last piece of lumber.
“What were you talking about, then?” he asked after he got it good and loose.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “I was just wondering if it was really worth all the trouble.”
“Uh…Yeah. It is,” JB answered without pausing as a goofy grin lit his face. “It really is.”
I shrugged, letting him know I’d just have to take his word on that one, and we finished stripping the bathroom of all the non-essential stud walls that had rotted.
We were still standing there, breathing hard in the empty place where his bathtub had been half an hour before when his wife appeared in the doorway with a toddler on her hip.
“Holy…shit…” Teagan breathed, gaping at the exposed walls and bare patch of floor. “How long did you say it was going to be like this?”
“I’ve already got a replacement on order,” JB promised as he went in to kiss her cheek, then took Harper from her arms. “So two or three weeks, I’d say. A month tops.”
“Or six months,” I teased from behind him.
Teagan peered around her husband to cringe at me. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
